satire

I have an unhealthy addiction to beautiful photographs of beautiful people.

I check Instagram every thirty minutes and log onto Tumblr for hours at a time. I go on Facebook to stalk the people with glittering lives and find them through what I can only imagine to be sheer desperation. The glitziest crowd is the Manhattanites. I once met a dark-haired girl over the summer who lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side, a true-life Gossip Girl in the flesh, hailing from Argentina’s international elite, with a backstory worthy of a Pulitzer Prize winning novel.

She vacations in Paris with her closest girlfriends, and they parade around the hotel room with thin flutes of champagne and dressed in nothing but white bathrobes, probably scented with roses. I know this because there are pictures of it all over Facebook. It’s an absurd life, but it looks amazing on camera, frozen into place and glossed over with a vintage filter. Nothing looks quite right these days without a filter over it. In fact, it would be a real discomfort, an act of defiance, to see a photo Instagrammed in unvarnished color, with no sepia or burnt-orange tinges and only the truth, black and white as ever. Continue reading →

I grew up in a world of mildly rich people with dippy problems.

These problems often concern serious trifles gone awry. A majority of them deal with the three final rungs on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: Belonging, Self-Esteem, and Self-Actualization. As for the people, we’re not The Rich Kids of Instagram. We don’t have inheritances or titles. But many of us are moderately wealthy tykes of the Lexus-driving variety and we all just graduated from the Academy, which comes with its own presumptions. We’re (more or less) well-educated and well-off, and we advocate for little brown children in South America via Valencia-tinged Instagram feeds. We’re also fiercely suburban, albeit in denial of the fact. As it seems, life is an absolute idyll for us, as absolute an idyll as the 1950s American Dream in 2014 can be.